CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND – JULY 13: In this handout image provided by New Zealand Police, collected firearms are seen at Riccarton Racecourse on July 13, 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand. It is the first firearms collection event to be held in New Zealand following changes to gun laws, providing firearms owners the initial opportunity of many to hand-in prohibited firearms for buy-back and amnesty. The Christchurch event is one of 258 events that will run across the country over the next three months.The NZ Government will pay owners between 25 per cent and 95 per cent of a set base price, depending on condition. It will also compensate dealers and pay for some weapons to be modified to make them legal. The amnesty ends on December 20.
Credit: New Zealand Police/Getty

A far-right mass murderer opens fire on a crowd of worshippers. His guns discharge hundreds of rounds in a matter of minutes. Bullets enter dozens of bodies indiscriminately. Fifty-one people die. A further 49 are injured. It is the deadliest […]

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We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Leading up to this year, farm incomes had been trending lower for most of the past decade, and meanwhile farm debt levels have been absolutely exploding.  So U.S. farmers were desperate for a really good year, but instead 2019 has been a total disaster.  As I have been carefully documenting, due to endless rain and catastrophic flooding millions of acres of prime farmland didn’t get planted at all this year, and the yields on tens of millions of other acres are expected to be way, way below normal.  As a result, we are facing the worst farming crisis in modern American history, and this comes at a time when U.S. farms are drowning in more debt than ever before.  In fact, the latest numbers that we have show that the average U.S. farm is 1.3 million dollars in debt…

Debt-to-asset ratios are seeing the same squeeze, with more farms moving into a ratio exceeding 80%. Barrett notes each year since 2009 has […]

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Forest wildlife is vital for maintaining healthy woodlands and jungles which act as a major carbon store and help curb climate change, a report by conservation charity WWF said.

Populations of animals that live in the world’s forests have declined by more than half in the past 50 years, a study warns. (emphasis added)

Forest wildlife is vital for maintaining healthy woodlands and jungles which act as a major carbon store and help curb climate change, a report by conservation charity WWF said.

Credit: IPBES

In May, a United Nations panel on biodiversity released a massive, troubling report on the state of the world’s animals. The bottom line: As many as 1 million species are now at risk of extinction if we don’t act to save them.

Species of all kinds — mammals, birds, amphibians, insects, plants, marine life, terrestrial life — are disappearing at a rate “tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years” due to human activity, the report stated. It implored the countries of the world to step up their actions to protect the wildlife that remains. Wildlife like the endangered gray wolves and caribou that roam the United States, or the threatened polar bear in the Arctic.

The Trump administration has just done the opposite.

On Monday, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced they were pushing through changes to the Endangered Species Act that will, in effect, weaken protections for species, and possibly give industry more leeway to develop […]

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